The present invention relates to radiant heaters and, more particularly, to multiple radiant heaters.
Radiant heating units have a wide range of uses from paint drying to shrinking heat-shrinkable tubes over wiring bundles or the like. In uses involving the drying of coatings on surfaces like paint, the surfaces are often substantial in extent or they are complex in shape, or both. Adequate drying of the entire extent of an expansive surface, or of all of the valleys and niches in a complicated surface, often requires the concurrent use of many such radiant heating units.
The use of multiple radiant heaters has often required extensive framing to be provided around the space in which the heating is to take place to thereby provide suitable mounting for such units. If a new shape is to be heated requiring a correspondingly reshaped heating space, such framing is often not usable in its original form and must often be substantially altered or replaced entirely to once again provide the radiant heating units to be used in the proper positions. These framing alterations and remounting of radiant heating units can be both time consuming and expensive, as is the complete replacement of the previous framing if necessary.
Often too, the change in shape provided by a new object is accompanied by some other changes which require a change in the wavelength of the infrared radiation being provided by the radiant energy heaters for optimum results. Thus, there will be a corresponding desire to change the radiation element in each of the radiant heating units, and to do so with as little effort as possible. In addition, the reflectors typically used in the heating element may also need to be changed.
Such changes in the heating units themselves have in the past also not been easily accomplished and many times have required obtaining replacement heating units. Thus, there is a desire to have a radiant heating unit for use in multiples where the assemblage of the multiple units can be easily relocated in spatial position and easily reconfigured in relative position to one another, as well as having their radiant elements and reflective elements easily changed.